Why ‘no’ to emergency

NOBODY can ever completely rule out emergency because future cannot be foretold. But the way government leaders are making reservations on this point suggests that the establishment has not given up the idea of using emergency as a way out of the political difficulties it anticipates during the next few months.

It may not be out of place, therefore, to go over the grounds that make imposition of emergency an unaffordable hazard.The recent uproar in the media and in political circles and fits of anxiety among friendly handlers abroad over reports that a proclamation of emergency was about to be issued proceeded from an assumption that the proposed step would be disastrous. There was little discussion on the arguments underlying this view, although indirect references to the need for free and fair elections did point to the central issue.

Any move towards putting the country under an emergency regime ignites grave apprehensions in large sections of the population because the measure in essence means:

Possibility of postponement of elections to the National Assembly;

Withdrawal of the protection of fundamental rights and courts from the people;

Abridgement of democracy and accountability in governance; and Encroachment on the provinces’ rights to self-management and autonomy.

This prospect is unwelcome at any time but it is something that cannot in any way be countenanced in the present circumstances. Perhaps the weightiest reason for anxiety at the moment is the possible use of emergency to put off the election of the National Assembly, vide clause (6) of Article 232 of the Constitution, which says:

“While a Proclamation of Emergency is in force, Majlis-e-Shoora (Parliament) may by law extend the term of the National Assembly for a period not exceeding one year and not exceeding in any case beyond a period of six months after the proclamation has ceased to be in force”.

Since Pakistan has suffered emergency regimes for indefinite periods, any extension of the National Assembly’s life till six months after the relevant proclamation of emergency has ceased to be in force should be out of the question. The arguments against the extension of the present National Assembly’s life by a year even, or a fraction of it, are irrefutable.

The provision of the Constitution the establishment may have its eyes on, and which has been reproduced above, is a bad innovation peculiar to the 1973 Constitution. One does not find it in the 1956 constitution, nor in the document described as the 1962 constitution, nor even in the interim constitution of 1972. The Indian constitution, from where the ideas of emergency provisions seem to have been originally derived, does not have such a provision. Why was this provision inserted? The law minister did refer to it in his speech while introducing the constitution bill but without offering a plausible justification.

The reason for postponement of an election is not visualised in constitutions lies presumably in the principle that elections should be put off only when life has been disturbed – by war, armed rebellion, internal conflict or natural disaster – to such an extent that casting of votes is impossible. In that event too a government’s declaration of impossibility of holding polls will not be enough; a certificate by the Election Commission expressing inability to hold elections will be necessary to justify a postponement. The opinions of both the Executive and the Election Commission could be challenged in courts.That a state of emergency does not altogether preclude the holding of an election can be gauged from Clause (8) of Article 232 itself: ”…… if the National Assembly stands dissolved at the time when a proclamation of emergency is issued, the proclamation shall continue in force for a period of four months but, if a general election to the Assembly is not held before the expiration of that period, it shall cease to be in force at the expiration of that period unless it has earlier been approved by a resolution of the Senate.”

The only legal requirement for postponement of National Assembly election the Constitution envisages is enactment of a law to that effect. In a functional democracy this condition might once have been considered a sufficient check on an executive’s wish to evade a reference to the electorate, but the way even the so-called mature democracies are functioning these days, making of undemocratic laws has become quite easy. The task is easier still in Pakistan where a deeply flawed measure such as the President to Hold Another Office Act of 2004 could be adopted by parliament in a matter of hours.

The reason the establishment’s political gurus are reported to have bamboozled General Musharraf into considering the emergency option is perhaps plain. First, they lack the confidence to face the electorate, especially if the exiled politicians are able to return home to the kind of reception the Chief Justice had or Javed Hashmi’s supporters could manage on his much delayed release. Secondly, if the National Assembly’s term is extended by a year the president’s election by the same electoral college that had validated his election in the first place, would become a constitutional necessity.

The advanced stage of myopia of the authors of this scheme requires no experts to diagnose. The government party will have lost the election before the polling booths opened. Besides, no honest practitioner of law could assure the establishment that the courts could not strike down the postponement of elections and the proclamation of emergency itself despite attempts to bar their intervention.

A fundamental objection to the postponement of the polls due after Nov 15, 2007, and which should have been due between September15 and November 15, 2007, if the LFO of 2002 had not introduced a mischievous change in the basic law, is that it will betray a plan to prevent a transition to democratic governance.

Now, accession to a democratic dispensation is the most essential objective before any people at any time. But in Pakistan’s case the compelling factors cannot be controverted. On the one hand the fiction of the existing regime being democratic is not believed by anyone outside the establishment’s hangers-on, and that is enough to underscore the urgency of a transition to a responsible democracy.

On the other hand, the crises Pakistan at present faces demand the earliest possible replacement of one-man rule by a democratically constituted collective body capable of ruling by consensus. Possibilities of such a change will be scotched the moment a proclamation of emergency is followed by a postponement of the general election.

The entire scheme of emergency will fail if fundamental rights and the right to approach the courts for their protection are not suspended. But the difficulties on this score are almost insurmountable. Nobody can be convinced that the situation warrants extinction of the people’s rights to freedom of movement, residence, association, assembly and expression, and their property rights. In their present mood the people are unlikely to acquiesce in a wanton assault on their most basic rights, especially because, contrary to a common notion, suspension of fundamental rights is not an inevitable concomitant of proclamation of emergency.

The 1954 proclamation did not prevent Maulvi Tamizuddin Khan from going to court. The suspension of fundamental rights under the proclamation of emergency of 1971 was withdrawn in 1974 while the state of emergency continued. The 1999 proclamation of emergency spared the fundamental rights and they might have been left untouched but for the Supreme Court’s benevolence in allowing the post-October 1999 authority to flout some of the basic rights.

Since there is nothing on the ground to justify any derogation from the fundamental rights, the likelihood of the judiciary’s following the Supreme Court verdict in striking down any suspension of fundamental rights in the wake of the 1998 emergency need not be ignored.

The last dangerous consequence of a proclamation of emergency – the assumption of a province’s law-making functions by the federal parliament and the imposition of governor’s rule in that province – has always been controversial in Pakistan. The provision in the Government of India Act of 1935, Article 93, had been so stoutly denounced in the years before independence that it was deleted in 1947. The post-independence authority deemed it prudent not only to revive the provision as Article 92-A, and later on as a new Article 93, but also to use it with abandon in each of the then four provinces.

The 1956 basic law and the subsequent constitutions mollified the opposition to the provision – and no other provision was hated more by the provinces – by transferring the possibility of sacking a provincial government from an ordinary Article of the constitution to a course available only under an emergency. But the semblance of concession to provinces will lose all meaning if a proclamation of emergency can be as cavalierly issued as has been the case in the past.

The debate in Pakistan on the justification for a proclamation of emergency has been kept alive throughout the past decades by the advocates of provincial rights / autonomy. The standard phrases traditionally used in both Pakistan and India – war or external aggression or internal disturbance beyond the means of a provincial government to control – have never satisfied the provinces and they have consistently assailed the vague expression “internal disturbance’. The Indians replaced this expression with a somewhat more easily defensible phrase ‘armed rebellion’ in 1979; Pakistan has so far resisted any change.

The centre’s encroachment on a province’s democratic rights has never been accepted as something good. At the present moment a proclamation of emergency will be specially unwelcome and suspect in at least two provinces – Frontier (ruled by former protégés of the establishment who have chosen to defy it in some areas) and Balochistan (where the source of all the disturbance one hears about is the federal authority itself). Instead of controlling disorder a proclamation of emergency in the present situation is likely to unleash forces of uncontrollable disorder.

The fact of the matter is that the emergency provisions of the Constitution that were conceived more than half a century ago have become archaic. They became indefensible in 1975 when the condition of extension of emergency by a joint session of the two houses of Parliament every six months was dropped.

These provisions have to be reviewed on five essential counts — the grounds of emergency, the fixation of a reasonable period for a proclamation to remain in force, the need to allow parliament members to move for an end to emergency, the people’s need for firmer guarantees against an executive’s whimsical attacks on fundamental rights, and the provinces’ right to safeguards against a predatory centre. This agenda itself is a strong argument against a proclamation of emergency or postponement of elections.

‘Boys go to Baghdad...’

IT’S impossible to say whether the United States will attack Iran before President George W. Bush leaves office in seventeen months’ time, because nobody in the White House knows yet either. It is easy to predict what would happen if the US did attack Iran, however, and the signs are that the hawks in the White House are winning that argument.

The most alarming sign is the news that the Bush administration is about to brand the Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a “terrorist organisation.” This is a highly provocative step, for the IRGC is not a bunch of fanatical freelances. It is a 125,000-strong official arm of the Iranian state, parallel to the regular armed forces but more ideologically motivated and presumably more loyal to the ruling clerics.

Declaring the Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organisation is not just a way for the US government to vilify Iran as a terrorist state. It is one of the key policy disputes between those in the administration, notably Secretary of State Condoleezza Rica and Defence Secretary Robert Gates, who think an attack on Iran would be unwise, and those around the vice-president, who think it is essential.

Almost everybody in the Bush administration believes that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons in order to dominate the region and to attack Israel. (Others are less certain.) The war party, led by Dick Cheney, also believes that the clerical regime in Iran would collapse at the first hard push, since ordinary Iranians thirst for US-style democracy -- and that the attack must be made while President Bush is still in office, since no successor will have the guts to do it. Even after all this time, the administration’s old machismo survives: “The boys go to Baghdad; the real men go to Tehran.”

So what will happen if Cheney & Co get their way? The Iranian regime would not collapse: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is now unpopular due to his mishandling of the economy, but patriotic Iranians would rally even around him if they were attacked by foreigners. What would collapse, instead, is the world’s oil supply and the global economy.

Major-General Yahya Rahim Safavi, commander-in-chief of the Revolutionary Guards, explained how that would be accomplished in a speech on 15 August (though he made no direct reference to the US threat). “Our coast-to-sea missile systems can now reach the length and breadth of the Gulf and the Sea of Oman,” he said, “and no warships can pass in the Gulf without being in range of our coast-to-sea missiles.” In other words, Iran can close the whole of the Gulf and its approaches to oil tanker traffic, and if the US Navy dares to fight in these waters it will lose.

Despite the huge disparity in military power between the United States and Iran, this is probably true. Over-committed in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States cannot come up with the huge number of extra troops that would be needed to invade and occupy a mountainous country of 75 million people. The US can bomb Iran to its heart’s content, hitting all those real and alleged nuclear facilities, but then it runs out of options -- whereas Iran’s options are very broad.

It could just stop exporting oil itself. Pulling only Iran’s three and a half million barrels per day off the market, in its present state, would send oil prices shooting up into the stratosphere. Or it could get tough and close down all oil-tanker traffic that comes within range of those missiles -- which would mean little or no oil from Iraq, Saudi Arabia or the smaller Gulf states either. That would mean global oil rationing, industrial shut-downs, and the end of the present economic era.

Can those missiles do all that? Yes, they can. The latest generation of sea-skimming missiles have mobile, easily concealed launchers, and they would come in very fast and low from anywhere along almost 2,000 kilometres (well over 1,000 miles) of Iran’s Gulf coast. Sink the first half-dozen tankers, and insurance rates for voyages to the Gulf become prohibitive, even if you can find owners willing to risk their tankers.

It’s very doubtful that US air strikes could find and destroy all the missile launchers -- consider how badly the Israeli air force did in south Lebanon last summer -- so Iran wins. After a few months, the other great powers would find some way for the United States to back away from the confrontation and let the oil start flowing again, but the US would suffer a far greater humiliation than it did in Vietnam, while Iran would emerge as the undisputed arbiter of the region.Many, perhaps most senior American generals and admirals know this, and are privately opposed to a foredoomed attack on Iran, but in the end they will do as ordered. Vice-President Dick Cheney and his coterie don’t know it, preferring to believe that Iranians would welcome their American attackers with glad cries and open arms. You know, like the Iraqis did. And Cheney seems to be winning the argument in the White House. ––Copyright

Branded memoirs

SUMMING up one’s life in a few words is not easy, but that is the challenge facing autobiographers choosing a title. Some simply duck it –– as Bill Clinton did, with his boringly badged My Life –– but others, including his wife (Living History) are prepared to be more distinctive.

John Prescott is among them: the former deputy prime minister has just signed a contract for Pulling No Punches, a reference to his indomitable style, but also his notorious left-jab in the 2001 election campaign. His punning approach follows that of Frank Lampard (Totally Frank), as well as Steven Norris, a former transport minister who left office and used a book to announce that he was Changing Trains.

Some authors make grandiose promises about the contents of their tomes (Dean Acheson’s Present at the Creation); others apologise for the lack of it (Wayne Rooney’s My Story So Far). Titles such as Terry Wogan’s Mustn’t Grumble capture the attitude with which the subject looks back on their life. Sometimes that tack reveals modesty –– Bill Rodgers, of the gang of four which established the SDP, reminisced in Fourth Among Equals –– and sometimes the opposite, as with Grand Inquisitor by Sir Robin Day.

Last week, it emerged Tony Blair had appointed the same US lawyer who netted Mr Clinton $12m to broker a deal for his memoirs.

––The Guardian, London

Preparing to cross the Rubicon

‘I WILL return to Pakistan between September and December,’ Benazir Bhutto told me in an exclusive interview last week. Pakistan’s former prime minister vowed to leave her exile in Dubai and go home ‘with or without an agreement’ with Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s military government.

Always controversial and fascinating, Ms Bhutto is getting ready to cross the Rubicon. On returning to Pakistan, she risks being treated as a rebel and criminal by the Musharraf regime and thrown into prison. Or, will the embattled, increasingly isolated Musharraf bow to his people’s demands and cooperate in restoring civilian-led democracy?

Ms Bhutto confirmed she has indeed, as rumoured, held rounds of intensive talks with Musharraf’s government. She also has held talks with old political rival, former PM Nawaz Sharif and senior US State Department officials.

However, Ms Bhutto denied my suggestion Washington is trying to engineer a deal to keep key ally Musharraf in power by having Benazir and her Pakistan’s Peoples Party join his government as junior coalition partners.

‘There is no agreement yet. The next two weeks will be crucial,’ she told me.

Clearly, the game’s afoot. It is hard to imagine a more exciting political drama. Benazir, long scorned by Pakistan’s powerful army generals, has thrown down the gauntlet to Gen. Musharraf.

Will throngs of avid Bhutto supporters seize Karachi Airport to open the way for her return? Or will Musharraf’s soldiers deny her incoming plane landing rights, just as Nawaz did to Musharraf’s aircraft in 1999?

Will the army arrest Bhutto – and Nawaz Sharif – on their return? Will there be mass riots, or will the army split, with some younger officers supporting Ms Bhutto. Reports come to me of growing unrest in the armed forces over the $1 billion monthly Washington pays the Musharraf government to ‘rent’ 80,000 of his soldiers to fight rebellious, pro-Taliban Pashtun tribesmen.

More questions abound. Will Musharraf drop criminal charges against Benazir, and annul recently reinstated charges against Nawaz? Newly assertive Pakistani courts may no longer serve as tools of government repression.

This writer has known Ms Bhutto for a long time and was often critical when she was prime minister. But you really only get to know people when they face adversity. I have watched Benazir face down many crises with coolness and consummate political skill and not give in to self-pity, even at the darkest times, a few of which I shared with her.

Benazir has grown in character and strength in exile and remains Pakistan’s most popular and capable democratic political leader. She has also learned a great deal about politics and human nature in the years since she was last a young prime minister surrounded by glowering older men and overtly hostile generals.

But wouldn’t a deal with Musharraf dismay her followers and tarnish her own reputation? ‘We must deal with reality,’ she politically answers. Power sharing with Musharraf, I asked? ‘We can get along with some generals,’ comes her cautiously reply. She used to accuse me of being too chummy with ‘your beloved Pakistani generals.’

‘Musharraf needs to resign to clear the way to promotion for younger, capable generals,’ says Bhutto, otherwise the army will lose some of its best men.

Bhutto says she is ready to work with Musharraf and a reinvigorated parliament to rebuild democracy in Pakistan, a process she calls ‘internal reconciliation.’ With an eye on her American audience and the White House, Bhutto adds, ‘only democracy can undermine terrorism.’ She is quite right, of course. Much of what the West terms ‘Islamic terrorism’ is really violence and protest directed against the Muslim World’s dictatorial regimes.But who would be the real boss in a ‘power-sharing’ deal? Benazir seems far too smart to be used as a token prime minister to legitimise Musharraf’s floundering regime. The general may be too accustomed to absolute power and yes men to accept constraint by a powerful prime minister and parliament. It seems a recipe for paralysis or, worse.

Musharraf would do his nation a favour by resigning as military chief and running in an honest election against Benazir and Nawaz. Democracy is Pakistan’s only fire exit from the increasingly dangerous tensions and risk of civil war it now faces.

How do you feel right now, I asked her? ‘Excited, tense,’ Benazir replied. That also sums up Pakistan’s mood as it waits for this remarkable lady to return home. — Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2007

Christianising soldiers

MAYBE what the war in Iraq needs is not more troops but more religion. At least that’s the message the Department of Defence seems to be sending. Last week, after an investigation spurred by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, the Pentagon abruptly announced that it would not be delivering “freedom packages” to American soldiers in Iraq, as it had originally intended.What were the packages to contain? Not body armour or home-baked cookies. Rather, they held Bibles, proselytising material in English and Arabic and the apocalyptic computer game “Left Behind: Eternal Forces” (derived from the series of post-Rapture novels), in which “soldiers for Christ” hunt down enemies who look suspiciously like U.N. peacekeepers.

The packages were put together by a fundamentalist Christian ministry called Operation Straight Up, or OSU. Headed by former kickboxer Jonathan Spinks, OSU is an official member of the Defence Department’s “America Supports You” program. The group has staged a number of Christian-themed shows at military bases, featuring athletes, strongmen and actor-turned-evangelist Stephen Baldwin.

But thanks in part to the support of the Pentagon, Operation Straight Up has now begun focusing on Iraq, where, according to its website (on pages taken down last week), it planned an entertainment tour called the “Military Crusade.”

Apparently the wonks at the Pentagon forgot that Muslims tend to bristle at the word “crusade” and thought that what the Iraq war lacked was a dose of end-times theology.

In the end, the Defence Department realized the folly of participating in any Operation Straight Up crusade. But the episode is just another example of increasingly disturbing, and indeed unconstitutional, relationships being forged between the US military and private evangelical groups.

Take, for instance, the recent scandal involving Christian Embassy, a group whose expressed purpose is to proselytise to military personnel, diplomats, Capitol Hill staffers and political appointees. In a shocking breach of security, Defence Department officials allowed a Christian Embassy film crew to roam the corridors of the Pentagon unescorted while making a promotional video featuring high-ranking officers and political appointees. (Christian Embassy, which holds prayer meetings weekly at the Pentagon, is so entrenched that Air Force Maj. Gen. John J. Catton Jr. said he’d assumed the organisation was a “quasi-federal entity.”)

The Pentagon’s inspector general recently released a report recommending unspecified “corrective action” for those officers who appeared in the video for violating Defence Department regulations. But, in a telling gesture, the report avoided any discussion of how allowing an evangelical group to function within the Defence Department is an obvious violation of the establishment clause of the 1st Amendment.

The extent to which such relationships have damaged international goodwill toward the U.S. is beyond measure. As the inspector general noted, a leading Turkish newspaper, Sabah, published an article on Air Force Maj. Gen. Peter Sutton, who is the U.S. liaison to the Turkish military — and who appeared in the Christian Embassy video.

The article described Christian Embassy as a “radical fundamentalist sect,” perhaps irreparably damaging Sutton’s primary job objective of building closer ties to the Turkish General Staff, which has expressed alarm at the influence of fundamentalist Christian groups inside the U.S. military.

Our military personnel swear an oath to protect and defend the Constitution, not the Bible. Yet by turning a blind eye to OSU and Christian Embassy activities, the Pentagon is, in essence, endorsing their proselytizing. And sometimes it’s more explicit than that.

That certainly was the case with Army Lt. Gen. William “Jerry” Boykin, deputy undersecretary of Defence for intelligence. The Pentagon put him in charge of the hunt for Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda in 2003.

––Los Angeles Times